Share this post

Link to post

The Eternity Engine was originally supposed to be used for the Eternity TC, hence its name. Why was the Eternity TC named Eternity? I don't know exactly, but I guess the plot revolved around time stuff.

ZDoom is just Doom with a Z in front of it. It was named like this so as to be at the end of any alphabetically sorted list of source ports.

GZDoom is ZDoom with a G in front. This can be interpreted in several ways ("GL ZDoom" for example, or "Graf Zahl Doom" maybe) and deliberately left ambiguous with no official meaning behind the name.

Skulltag is named after the game mode that was supposed to be its main feature. Tag games made out of mapping tricks appeared a long while ago in the multiplayer scene, notably with deathtag/dogtag, and Skulltag was meant to provide engine-side support for the concept.

Zandronum was the Skulltag fork with no name. The community argued for several names for the project, and among those who gained some traction were Andromeda (emphasizing Doom's sci-fi aspect since it's most famous as a nebula name) and Infernum (emphasizing Doom's occult aspect), while other people argued the name had to start with a Z to show the ZDoom filiation. By lack of consensus, these things were mashed up together to give Z_andro_num.

Share this post

Link to post

"Eternity" was come up with as a name for the Eternity Total Conversion project on a whim by my high school friend Josh Bimat, aka "AeNiGMa". He wasn't ever really an active member of the online community despite his interest in Doom at the time and it ended up just being a phase for him. Ironically, he was the one who got me involved to begin with.

The choice of name was fairly obvious - the TC was to deal with traveling through the fractured multiverse created by the demons' rewriting of history through use of the UAC's time travel experiments, taking you to different periods in human history - both as we knew it originally, and as it developed anew in response to the demons' changes.

"The Eternity Engine" emerged first simply as "the Eternity TC engine," not being an entity entirely distinct from the project it was supposed to host - development was aimed at implementation of the features needed for that specific project. As the TC stagnated, and the potential of doing cool stuff with the executable became clear to me (mainly vis-a-vis my involvement with Lee Killough doing beta testing on MBF), I made making it a more general standalone product a goal.

Share this post

Link to post

The ones I'm most curious about are Zdaemon and Odamex. I assume ZD has some relation to the "DOOM refresh daemon" that we see on startup, but that's always been a mystery to me as well. But what exactly IS an "Odamex"? I think Zwango would have been a pretty cool name for it.

Marines Best Friend is a play on Mans Best Friend, I suppose since you have ally dogs.

No clue about SMMU, other than the obvious song reference.

I would guess Legacy was named that because Doom has left such a legacy in gaming.

Computer software, and sometimes also other computing-related systems like computer hardware or algorithms, is called Vanilla when not customized from its original form, meaning that it is used without any customizations or updates applied to it. Vanilla software can become a widespread de facto industry standard, widely used by businesses and individuals.

The term comes from the traditional standard flavor of ice cream, vanilla flavor. According to Eric S. Raymond's The New Hacker's Dictionary "vanilla" means more "ordinary" than "default".

Share this post

Link to post

In the Doom community, "vanilla" means the original engine, possibly modified by DeHackEd. In other game communities, it can have a slightly different meaning, e.g. if you see something like "vanilla Morrowind" in an Elder Scrolls forum, it refers to the game data rather than the game engine, so it means "without plugins".

Share this post

Link to post

DoomLegacy -
I do not know. I suspect it had more to do with porting to Linux, OS/2 and the others, and it brought the Legacy of Doom to those OS.
Probably to avoid calling them Linux Doom, OS/2 Doom, etc..